Alasdair Gray is out of the good whisky. We are in his kitchen in the ground floor flat of a pretty Glasgow tenement not far from the Byres Road. He is sat in his wheelchair; I am going through his cupboards. “You’re out of the Tallisker, Alasdair.” I tell him. “Is Bells okay?” It is. He has me fetch him a mug and add a little water, then takes the bottle to pour the whisky himself. Clearly, he suspects my measures would be insufficiently generous.
Born in Glasgow in 1934, Gray studied design and mural painting at the city’s School of Art, adding fiction-writing to his artistic studies before the end of his degree. In the years since, he has written nine novels and countless short stories as well as poetry, plays, essays and—most recently—a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Long revered in Scotland, Gray has an epigraph engraved on the Canongate wall of Holyrood in Edinburgh: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Venerated in Scotland, Gray is much less well known down south. In 2003 the Guardian described him as “largely ignored,” with interviewer Euan Ferguson bemoaning that mentions of his name in “literary London” are met with “strange looks.”
Yet Gray’s most famous novel, Lanark, often features on “best-of” lists on both sides of the border. Published in 1981, when Gray was 47, this epic novel follows its titular character through a realist bildungsroman set in modern Glasgow and his posthumous trials in a dystopian mirror-world called “Unthank.” For Irvine Welsh, it is “probably the closest thing Scotland’s ever produced to Ulysses.” He is not alone in his admiration. Over email, the writer Ali Smith tells me that “everyone who really reads, I mean really truly loves what books can do, knows and reveres Gray’s work.” Will Self, also a fan, refers to the author as “a little grey deity.”
Gray’s kitchen is relatively bare, lacking the personality of clutter. His living room, however, testifies to his career as a writer and artist. Tables are stacked with books and drawings, and the walls hung with paintings ranging from landscapes to his own portraits. A large easel shows a work in progress; opposite, there is a drafting table covered in loose papers. Bookshelves dotted about the room feature the names of writers to whom he is often linked—I spy Hugh MacDiarmid and James Joyce, as well as copies of Gray’s own 1982 Janine and his recent essay compilation, Of Me and Others. Before my arrival, his assistant Stef—an artist himself—made sure Gray had a sandwich and a glass of milk set up for lunch. As we talk, Gray pushes them aside to make space for his mug of whisky.
“I like and fear the idea of becoming a thing with an unliving public shape,” Gray writes in the opening essay of Of Me and Others. “But I obviously like it more than fear it.” Still, in person he is ill at ease with personal questions—or bored by those he feels have already been answered in his book. When I ask about a recurring theme of his work—what it means to be an individual within the world—he replies that it is “a very ordinary one, commonplace.” He pauses. “I’m sorry, it seems to me so ordinary I cannot think of any clever explanation for it.” Gray looks a little tired. He lost his ability to walk in a fall in 2015, and I wonder briefly if his heart is in this interview.
Once we move on to literature, however, he flourishes. “James Joyce, in his Portrait of the Artist, says that only improper arts actually move you. And among ‘improper arts’ he mentions of course pornography and propaganda.” Gray takes a deep breath. “This, I largely believed. In 1982, Janine my central character, Jock McLeish, is somebody whose sex life has become purely masturbatory fantasies. I have a quantity of these pornographic fantasies in it. But I also present him as a working-class Tory. He’s a conservative because he is, like Margaret Thatcher, from a white-collar lower-middle-class background. Almost working class…”
“The English novelist Jonathan Coe told me that in reading 1982, Janine he assumed it was a conservative novel, and it was only towards the end that he realised all of the arguments were basically pressing in the opposite direction. And I liked that. I was pleased about that.”
This shift from pornography to propaganda is typical. Gray’s portrait of humanity is always explicitly situated in relation to the surrounding culture, his stories of personal shame turned outwards. “Gray has always made work that rewrites the possibilities for both art and living,” Ali Smith tells me. “He knows there’s no divide between them, that they’re umbilically connected.” In Lanark, Gray says, his central character “lived in a society, in a modern Scotland, where he could not produce the works of art he wished, and therefore he goes mad—in a sense—and commits suicide.” “I have no intention of doing these things,” he adds.
Gray has previously written on his desire for Scotland to nurture what he calls a “confident culture.” “The fact is, I’m one of a generation of Scottish artists—Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Jim Kelman, many others—where it was the university grants that gave us educations without getting us or our parents into debt,” he says. “I belonged to the post-war generation. My health care was provided by the national system and my education by the welfare state. I really believed that Britain was to become an example to the rest of the world, without becoming a… totalitarian, single-party government like the USSR, or being governed by the cliques or millionaires like the USA. We were showing the way to the rest of the world,” he concludes, delivering this last line with a wince of irony.
“It rather depresses me to think that civilisation might collapse before it can assist me to die”
As he talks, Gray rubs his hands through now-thinning hair, staring into the middle distance. When wishing to be wry, he has a habit of adopting a strange falsetto, the effect of which is akin to speaking in all caps without raising his voice a decibel. He frequently makes himself laugh; not in the manner a self-satisfied man, but rather with the air of someone who delights in his subject too much not to laugh at it. A mention of a Flann O’Brien story makes him caw, as do some of the finer plot points of Hamlet. I’m reminded of that other icon of Glasgow, Billy Connolly, who frequently collapses into giggles during his own comedy sets.
There is a black humour, too, in much of Gray’s writing on health and the body. In 1997, he wrote a play for a troupe of disabled actors entitled Working Legs: A Play for People Without Them. “We keep announcing that the welfare state, the National Health Service, has been increasingly endangered. The government keeps saying we’ve given millions of pounds to the NHS,” Gray tells me, then laughs. “It rather depresses me to think that civilisation might collapse before it can assist me to die, with proper health care, in comfort.” It is perhaps the most Scottish thing I have ever heard.
We are back on to politics, and for Gray that means drawing on an author often seen as the embodiment of genteel Englishness. “I remember when I was at school I did not like Jane Austen’s novels. We were given Pride and Prejudice to read and I thought, does it matter?” It was only in hospital with little in the way of reading materials that Gray sat down with Persuasion and found that Austen’s bourgeois world was being used to highlight the trials and tribulations of capital. “Here was this situation where the heroine has a terribly snobbish, manipulative parent and sister and, for that matter, friend of the family, who she likes, but who don’t want her to marry a sea captain. But she likes him, and he likes her very much. And I thought,” he says primly, “maybe that is a kind of tragedy, you know?”
At the nearest subway stop to his flat, Hillhead, the entire wall opposite the ticket barriers is given over to a Gray mural depicting what he captions as “all kinds of folk,” including “head cases,” “financial hazards” and “pigeons.” Despite his extraordinarily wide-ranging interests, Gray’s work remains principally in and of Glasgow, his line drawings of the city the sort of clear-eyed love letter only a local can produce.
“His involvement in and ambition for Scotland’s art and cultural scene is unwavering,” Katie Bruce, a curator at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art (GoMA), tells me. “He has always made art and supported his peers.” More than one Scottish writer, too, has a personal story of a debt owed to Gray. For Smith, it was attending a reading held by him and James Kelman when she was at the University of Aberdeen: “I came away from that reading knowing, gifted with the knowledge, that anything was possible in writing. Any voice, any form.”
Laura Waddell also encountered Gray while a student, while working in a jewellery shop. “It was strange to be in the presence of this totemic figure, doing something as everyday as buying an alarm clock.” Now a writer and on the board of leading Scottish literary magazine Gutter, Waddell explains that Gray’s work “opened the door to re-imagining Scotland for a lot of writers who came afterwards.” Yet Bruce suggests he is slightly under-valued when it comes to his artworks. “The assumption being that he is a writer,” she says, adding, “although we had his works in the collection since 1978 they were not shown at GoMA before 2011.”
This comparative lack of recognition for his artworks seems to have worried Gray, too. “I had no trouble getting my works of fiction printed after Lanark, but I wanted to bring out a ‘my life in pictures’ book,” he says. “Of course, I would have preferred”—he puts on an airy, mocking, Edinburgh burr—“for some art firm to have brought it out with an introduction with a major critic. When I was younger, I hoped it might be Henry Reed. Then John Berger. Gradually they all died, so I did it myself.”
After a London literary contact declined to find a publisher for his poetry, Gray ended up with the independent Hebridean Two Ravens Press, about whom he is effusive in his praise. “Despite the success of some genres such as crime, Scottish books have not always gained traction in England,” Waddell explains. “They can be viewed as too local, and too other, and that is a little frustrating at times.” Smith is more optimistic, but also notes the national tenor of his work: “Gray is the pinnacle of an astonishing group of writers who made the Scottish literary renaissance of the second half of the last century not just happen but be apparent.”
“Virgil is giving him trouble.”
In spite of this, when I ask Gray about a potential second independence referendum post-Brexit, he sounds unimpressed. “That is what I did hope. Unfortunately, the independent Scotland—in so far as Scotland has its independence—is turning out as Tory as Westminster.” He cites the movement of nuclear bases to the Western Highlands. “The London government has rather sensibly shifted its atomic weapon bases into Scotland as far away from London as they can get it. Very wise of them. But heavens, the Scottish government…” Gray rattles off the appointment of English police chiefs, the refusal to dilute Westminster militarism, the cuts in services. “I’m just… disappointed in the way Scotland has taken.”
Towards the end of our interview, we talk about the illustration Gray is working on: a cover for the second volume of the Divine Comedy. (His Inferno came out in 2018). Several papers are laid out across his drafting table, each with the same outline of a cave mouth, each with a sketched and re-sketched figure in the bottom corner. Virgil is giving him trouble. He’s stressed about it, Stef confides in me—the publisher wants the pages. What’s more, it’s only one of several projects he has on the go: while I’m there, Gray shows me a new edition of his poems being brought out by a small American press, and hints at other written works. Although his health is clearly not what it was—and although the resultant loss of independence cannot be a pleasant development for the man who had often elected to describe himself first and foremost as “a Glasgow pedestrian”—it seems Gray has little intention of slowing down. At one point in our interview he is caught up in a prolonged fit of coughing, and I ask him if he wants me to fetch him a glass of water. “No, no,” he replies, then adds after a pause: “although, perhaps, I would like a whisky.”
***
Down the road from Gray’s flat there is a bar and restaurant called Orán Mór, for which he designed the murals. He still goes for lunch there, with Scotland’s literary luminaries sending a cab, Stef pushing him back up the hill. In March, it was announced that Gray was working on a series of painted mirrors depicting the plasterers, joiners and other tradesmen who helped transform the space, a former disused church, ahead of its reopening in 2004. “He has always seen the importance of the book as object and of the connection between words and images, between histories of texts, images and peoples,” Smith says. In the paintings, the workers look wry, lined, human. Once again, Gray is showing the city itself; always hoping for that better nation.
“Of Me and Others: 1952-2019” is published by Canongate
This piece originally referred to "Tom Lennon" and "Jim Calvin", rather than Tom Leonard and Jim Kelman.
